>My feelings about it may well normalize over time, but only if I survive long enough.
Based on what you said, it implies that well-being drops as a time-dependent function. Yet when we study psychological well-being, we see the opposite trend except at the very, very end of life when well-being dips. If your assumption were true, wouldn't well-being be expected to continually drop across one's life? (Unless, I suppose, the other assumption is that we bolster that through more consumption.)
I think this is change in how you initially framed the problem. If "better" can be objectively measured and "better" correlates to happiness, then I wouldn't expect it to normalize at all. The fact that it does change implies that subjective well-being doesn't actually hinge on how objectively better something is.
